Homepage of Proxan

You are visiting the homepage of the Proxan program. Proxan is a tool that analyses microscopic images to determine whether two sets of biological features show a spatial relationship or not.

Proxan is free software, you can download and re-distribute it. You also get the source code (in fact you get only the source code) so that you can modify it if you wish. Proxan is released under the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License, Version 2.0 or any newer version (at your discretion). Proxan runs on the GNU/Linux operating system. If you want to know more about Proxan, please read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Current Stable Version

The currently available stable version is 1.1b. It has some added features compared to 1.0 (in particular, the distribution of active objects can be examined) and a handful of bugs have been fixed. It is unlikely that there would be a 1.2 version as we decided to rewrite the whole code to make it more modular, flexible and extensible. The timing of the new version is a bit hazy but we hope that it would happen in 2006. The current version is V1.1-beta (last modified on 2005 Nov 13). Previous is V1.0-beta (last modified on 2004 July 13); that was the first public release.

The 'beta' means that the program is fairly stable. It does not crash (if it does please tell us!) and in general it does what it should. There still are certain issues that have to be addressed (see below). Furthermore, it is still being tested against extreme scenarios.

Documentation

Proxan's documentation is available as a PDF (a.k.a. Adobe Acrobat) file. It is not complete yet, we are currently writing it. Whenever we finish a chapter, we update the document on the website, so please come back regularly to check for updates. There will be a comment beside the link telling you what is the last chapter in that particular version. Unfortunately, the documentation is very incomplete and for a great degree you are on your own to figure out how the program works. Come back every now and then because even terse documentation is better than nothing, so we will put together a simple textfile that explains all the options and the general use of the program.

Installation

There is a chapter in the manual that tells you how to do that, please read it. If you are not familiar with installing programs from source code, you might want someone from your IT department do it for you.

Download

Proxan's source code, version 1.1b, a gzip compressed tar archive file, 110KB.
Proxan's source code, version 1.0b, a gzip compressed tar archive file, 95KB.
Proxan's manual, last chapter is VI.I.c (Colour selection). It is a PDF file, 1.4MB.

Known Bugs and Issues

Bugs

None known, if you find one, please let us know.

Issues

The following is a list of issues that we are aware of. If you find other problems, inconveniences or lack of features, please tell us about them.

Meaningless colour settings
The program does not warn you if you select the same colour for reference and active objects. Furthermore, it does not warn you if you select white, gray or black for one of the colours, even though these colours can not be used.
Filter range is too large
There is not much point in using filter kernels above 10 pixels. The range of the filter tool should be limited to that.
Warn about closing without saving If you close an image window without saving the results, Proxan does not warn you that you will lose your work. It should pop up a confirmation window.
More sanity checks are needed
Proxan does not check extreme cases such as complete lack of reference or active objects, distance settings that result in no distance vectors at all and so on. These conditions should be checked and a warning issued if they occur.